Near Field Communication (NFC) is mainly useful in mobile phones and tablets for close range transactions/data exchange. The phone becomes an RFID reader or tag. It can read tags on bottles and posters. Over 200 million NFC-enabled mobile phones have recently been deployed: Manufacturers controlling 85% of the mobile phone and tablet market include it. This report critically looks at uses, forecasts, technology, global situation, competing technologies and timelines.

NFC could never be used in a major way until it was widely deployed in devices. In the last year that deployment has happened very rapidly. Now the questions are what will be the major applications? Who in the value chain will mainly benefit? The world's leading financial card companies, mobile phone operators, manufacturers, chip makers, consumer goods companies and others are intensely interested and investing strongly.

NFC is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4cm or less to initiate a connection partly because people do not trust making secure transactions at the longer distances typical with Bluetooth, WiFi and other short range radio protocols. The most popular mobile phone and tablet operating system is heavily committed to NFC.

Mobile phones continue to be by far the most important potential and actual focus of NFC; the technology is particularly suitable for them. The SIM card in your mobile phone is a smart card identifying your account to the network. On NFC phones, the SIM is being extended to act as the Secure Element that can hold other apps such as payment cards. For example, NFC allows you to share small packets of data between an NFC tag and an Android-powered device, or between two Android-powered devices. Most contactless point-of-sale payment systems use an NFC-compatible contactless interface and many of the world's transportation access systems are NFC compatible so considerable infrastructure is already in place for use by NFC-enabled devices. Although progress with transport systems and payments is slow.

Many trials of other potential uses of NFC continue to be created but they tend to be a poor indication of what happens at rollout. To say contactless cards are NFC is playing with words: they predate NFC and would succeed if NFC had never been invented.

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This report examines the existing and future applications of NFC technology and the major players competing in the market, along with ten year market forecasts. It covers issues such as standardization, security and licensing, plus global progress split by country and key interviews from 2013.1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS1.1. Timelines for NFC adoption1.2. Great potential1.3. Forecasts 2014-20241.4. The purpose of NFC1.5. NFC Forum1.6. Massive rollout in 20131.7. Sensor fusion and NFC1.8. Internet of Things and NFC1.9. Security and privacy concerns1.10. Lessons from NFC World Congress Nice France September 20131.11. Other impediments to use of NFC2. WHAT IS NFC?2.1. NFC modes2.2. GSMA2.3. Store Logistics and Payment with NFC: StoLPaN

"We're here to tell the world about our cloud-scale infrastructure that we have at Juniper combined with the world-class security that we put into the cloud," explained Lisa Guess, VP of Systems Engineering at Juniper Networks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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